paolone: I made my posts over a course of time. I began with one guide which suggested I could make two partitions, one for AROS and one FAT to transfer files from one system to the other.
Initially that was what I was trying to do, then I found your guide and said screw it and just formatted the whole thing to FAT so AROS would see and detect it. I was NOT trying to install AROS onto FAT. I just want AROS to format the thing via the installer, but now that my drives are corrupt beyond repair, I can no longer do this, but I am going to order a DVD-ROM for the computer I intended to install it on. In this way I can be sure that no more of my drives get destroyed.
As for DISKPART, I use MicroXP, so DISKPART (along with a slew of other things) are not part of this distro, but believe me, it compensates with speed!
It is for this reason that I used a Hard Drive tool, and I set the USB drive to active, just as a safety precaution as I know some things such as my Nintendo WII will not see the hard drive unless it is set to active, that's why I chose that step...
...but anyhow, my drives are now useless as boot devices, so I'm going to send them back to Sandisk and never attempt this again. I'd rather just invest in an extra DVD-ROM as suggested above, besides, who wants an AROS machine without a DVD-ROM?

P.S. It did take FOREVER to get a response here, while I do thank you in particular for responding, I do have to say that this does look bad for the AROS scene and does make it look like there are hardly any users.